It’s good to know the baseline! Thank you for sharing.
$61k in 2012 dollars translates to $86k in 2025 dollars. Which is around $120k in Canadian dollars. So I guess I should revise my baseline guess that a film festival ED should likely paid $60k, and up it by quite a bit. Hi Cecilia, I realize that I am talking about pre historic times. When I started working at Canyon 1980 salary was $3.65 per hour for 20 hours. In the interim of course salaries increased. The most I made at Canyon was $61,000 and that was in 2012 the year of my termination. My average salary was about $45-50k. The one person staff, Linda Scobie, was paid $20-$25 per hour plus benefits. I have written a book of my time and experiences at Canyon from 1980-2012 and currently seeking a publisher. 85% of the income at Canyon Cinema was earned income and not from grants or donations. All those who worked at Canyon were committed to the "cause" and certainly not the money. The believed, and still do, in the organization and the filmmakers.
Dominic Hi Dominic,
Out of curiosity, how much were you paid during your tenure as ED of Canyon Cinema? I’m always interested in comparing wages in the past vs. current wages.
For better or worse, a film festival is not the same as a year-round org. It might theoretically be easier to run a film festival if it is already part of a year-round org that can cover off many of the admin expenses. But the problem is that year-round orgs and festivals function in such fundamentally different ways, that I cannot imagine that a festival run by a year-round org is just a festival in name, and not in functionality.
As well, Dominic, the reality is the sector cannot bank on there being a bunch of arts admin starts like you. It can only be sustainable if it structures its systems for average folks. My baseline is: if the context is not feasible for a single mother, then it is being subsidized by some kind of privilege that is not accessible to all.
And I guess my question to Paul is: what happens to The Public Cinema when you are not able to take on the bulk of the labour as a volunteer? I imagine it shuts down, no?
More generally, a lot of the small to mid-sized festivals are being carried by individuals or very small groups of individuals who have been looking after them for many years. But when these people have to move on or are no longer able to carry the festivals on, I imagine they will shut down. I know several festivals that are, yes, handled by a group of volunteers or paid staffers, but where one or two people are so fundamentally central to their administrative existence, that if those key folks leave, the festivals are certain to shut down - if not immediately, then within 2-3 years.
That’s more the true reality of the sector.
It is easy to look up tax returns of any non profit Film Festival by just googling it. I will not name any festivals here for fear of being hanged. I notice that some have very high wages for the top administrative jobs. When I ran Canyon Cinema not only was I the Executive Director, but also the grant writer, the book keeper, advertising, publisher of catalogs and supplements, dealing with filmmakers and renters and public presentations just to name some. In many non profits these positions are filled with extra employees, one for the bookkeeping, one for advertising, one for fundraising. It was a necessity at Canyon Cinema because we just could not afford to hire extra staff to do such duties. I doubt many non profits operate this way, and the staff at Canyon was paid decently with benefits and Canyon almost always made a profit. Go figure.
D From the perspective of someone who recently co-founded and now art directs a relatively small fest (4 days, 2 screens) that has been fairly well received ...
Ten years ago, Paul Harrill and I bought a projector, reached out to some local event spaces, and launched The Public Cinema. We both considered it then, and still do today, a kind of volunteer service to our arts community. We'd raise just enough money to cover screening fees and then show two or three free movies per month. Our guiding programming principle was "the best cinema that wouldn't screen in Knoxville otherwise."
We called it The Public Cinema because we wanted to start a conversation here about film exhibition drifting toward a new phase that would require public and private support. Our talking point is: "We have a great museum with free admission. We have a symphony orchestra and two opera companies and public sculptures. We have dance companies and theaters. And none of that would exist without philanthropy and budget lines at the local and state level. What would it look like if we approached film from the same perspective?"
A decade later, our festival is being supported by Visit Knoxville, which, among other things, has allowed us to avoid submission fees. Our top priority, with both The Public Cinema and Film Fest Knox, has always been paying the artists, either directly or via their distributors. Years ago, when we came up $100 short for a screening, I wrote a check. We offer good prizes in our competitions and a generous travel package. I'm really proud of what we're building here, but it took eight years. I sometimes daydream about starting a non-profit that would subsidize start-up costs and provide guidance to others who want to build something similar in other American cities.
If you haven't already guessed, the problematic part of our model is that I'm essentially volunteering my expertise and labor, which I'm happy to do because it's great fun and an important service to our community and to cinema. I'm also able to volunteer because I have a career that is totally unrelated to film. (I spend many lunch hours and most evenings working on the fest, especially right now, in the final weeks of programming.)
All of which is to say ... I can't imagine a world where ad and ticket revenues will ever cover the costs of putting on a festival. I've spent a lot of time digging through 990 tax forms of long-standing non-profit film organizations in America, and their income generally breaks down evenly into three sources: revenue, philanthropy/memberships/endowment earnings, and state support/grants. I think every fest should aspire to that model. If you're charging filmmakers to not screen their work, and not paying artists to screen their work, then maybe you take some time off and rethink your approach?
Gotta get back to my day job, Darren
Film festivals often do seem like a scam to me, as they did a long
ago too.
I was once offered a co-judgeship, with no pay, in something called
the Onion City Film Festival, in Chicago. This was in 1987, give or
take a year or two. I declined. I stated to them my two objection to
film festivals: (1) The entry fees and (2) that the judges had to
agree among themselves about prizes, thereby producing all kinds of
compromises. In this festival, there was to be one other judge, and
they had $2,000 in prize money. I suggested that each judge should
be able to allocate $1,000 to entries in whatever manner they saw
fit.
To my shock, I got called back a week later, agreeing to the plan
for prize money and stating that they had reduced the entry fee to
return postage. I was charmed, and felt I could not refuse. Even
better, my co-judge turned out to be Gunvor Nelson.
Weirdly, there were two entries to this festival that should not
have happened. One was a film by Sharon Couzin, who actually ran the
organization putting on the film festival. Even more weirdly, she
was away when I was offered a judgeship, and when she returned she
was angry to hear it, saying that I would figure out how to give all
the money to one of my own films — yet she herself had entered, and
I certainly had not. She apparently didn't realize that we could
have created maximum trouble for her by awarding her all the prize
money, and jokingly proposed that to Gunvor, but of course we
didn't. The other problematic entry was a film by Gunner's daughter
Oona. We wrote a letter to the organization suggesting that people
who worked on the organization and their close relatives, and also
the close relatives of judges, should not be permitted to enter.
Since I lately have been making films again myself, I looked into
festivals via "Film Freeway." I'm not sure I would recommend this
site, but have used it to enter a few. I certainly know all the
stories — the judges look at only the first three minutes to see if
their attention is caught; there is a pre-selection committee of
teenagers. I wonder if some AI engine will be "trained" to judge
films? I would feed the engine Brakhage's Arabics , Kenji
Mizoguchi's Genroku Chushingura, and Samuel Fuller's Shock
Corridor as its training in recognizing advanced cinema art.
Anyway, I did enter some, to the tune of a few hundred dollars, but
entered expecting nothing. I was surprised to see that hardly any
give financial prizes. I guess they think that being shown in their
super-fabulous festival is prize enough.
Fred Camper
Chicago
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